Saad Bin Nasir and Jong Seok Park have been named as the recipients of the 2016-2017 Predoctoral Achievement Awards, given by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS). Nasir and Park are Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and will receive their awards at the IEEE SSCS Conference, to be held February 5-9, 2017 in San Francisco, California.

This award is the highest honor presented to Ph.D. students by the IEEE SSCS and recognizes unique contributions in advancing the state-of-the-art in circuit design. Nasir and Park are the second and third Georgia Tech students to receive this honor since its inception in 1983. 

Saad Bin Nasir

A fourth year Ph.D. student, Nasir is the first Georgia Tech student working in the area of digital and mixed-signal design to win this award. He is a member of the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab, where he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Arijit Raychowdhury. Nasir is the author or co-author of over 15 peer-reviewed publications in premier conferences and journals in the areas of integrated circuits and systems. He received a Best in Session Award in the power management track at SRC TECHCON 2016, held on September 12-13 in Austin, Texas. 

The IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award is recognition of Nasir’s research on fine-grained spatio-temporal power management on a chip. On-die power management continues to be a significant challenge in low power system on chips (SoCs) and microprocessors as digital systems undergo large changes in operating conditions across “dynamic voltage and frequency scaling” (DVFS) states.

Nasir’s research has resulted in the design of novel digital and hybrid linear voltage regulators based on advanced control-theoretic laws and modeling. His work has enabled ultra-low voltage linear regulators with high gain and bandwidth. Silicon measurements on regulator topologies that utilize information from across the software stack have demonstrated best-in-class response times and energy efficiencies. These embedded linear voltage regulators have enabled unprecedented levels of power/performance trade-off for mobile SoCs and server-class chips.

This research has been funded by SRC, Intel, and Qualcomm. Nasir’s research outcomes have gained significant traction with both semiconductor companies and academia, and have already made it into industrial prototypes and test-chips.

Jong Seok Park

A fifth year Ph.D. student, Park is a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS), led by ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang. This is the second consecutive year that a GEMS Lab student has won this award. Song Hu, who is also advised by Wang, received this award in 2015-2016 and was the first Georgia Tech student to receive this honor. 

Park is the author or co-author of 26 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications, all in the area of integrated circuits and systems. He has received multiple prestigious student awards and fellowships, including the Doctoral Study Abroad Fellowship (The Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies KFAS), the Analog Devices Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2014, co-recipient of the 2014 IEEE RFIC Best Student Paper Award (1st Place), leading author of the 2015 IEEE CICC Best Student Paper Award (2nd Place), and the 2015 Catalyst Foundation/IBM/Intel IEEE CICC Student Scholarship Award. He was also the lead author of the 2016 IEEE Sensors Conference Best Live Demo Award (2nd Place).

This SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award is in recognition of Park's Ph.D. research on “Multi-Modality Cellular Interface with Single-Cell Resolution and Tissue-Level Field-of-View (FoV).” The physiological responses of cells are widely used as powerful sensing tools in cell-based assays to characterize the potency and toxicity of new drugs, determine the patient-specific treatment in personalized medicine, and detect biohazards and pollutants in environmental monitoring. However, cells are highly complex systems that often undergo concurrent multi-physics responses when subjected to external biochemical stimuli. Existing electronic sensors are mostly of single-modality and each can only respond to one type of physiological signal, such as electrochemical or optical signals, from the cells. Such single-modality sensors fundamentally cannot capture the complex multi-physics cell physiology and largely limit our understanding. 

Park’s Ph.D. research explores and demonstrates a novel multi-modality cellular interfacing array platform with joint sensing/actuation capabilities using nano-electronic CMOS processes to achieve simultaneous monitoring of multiple orthogonal cellular physiological responses. This platform will potentially enable holistic cellular characterization and impact many areas including drug screening, stem cell manufacturing, regenerative medicine, implantable bioelectronics, neural/cognitive science, synthetic biology, and hybrid biotic/abiotic (cells/semiconductor) systems.

Park’s related research has been supported by NSF, SRC, ONR, and Intel, and has been published at several premier conferences and journals, including the 2015 IEEE ISSCC. Live demonstrations of Jong Seok's research were performed at the 2015 IEEE BioCAS and 2016 IEEE Sensors conferences and won the Best Live Demo Award (2nd Place) at the 2016 IEEE Sensors conference.